Looks an excellent job Ed not like I expected anything else! Does your stink pipe also cast a shadow on the panels? I'm a bit in 2 minds about that sort of shadowing. Put a hand over a panel and you can see the power drop off but on my ground racks I have extra peces I have not cut off becuse I want to re use the metal when I put the panels on the roof. The array that is shadowed ALWAYS make more power than the same size array with the same batch of panels beside it that get no shadowing. Might be inverter efficency but that bit of a thin pole does not seem to hurt output although it only does hit the panels during the morning and afternoon rather than peak time.

Don't talk to me about wind and panels. Blew up here again yesterday and i came home to see 2 panels from my ground mount rack lying flat on their face on the grass. I thought thats Odd, I'm sure I screwed those things to each other and the frame.

I had. The tek screws had ripped right through the ally frames of the panels and were still in the mount frame. Made a bit of a mess of the panels with torn metal everywhere but they weren't damaged where it counts on the glass. Must have been some wind but I'm amazed that only these panels copped it and none of the others, even the ones leaning on the hedges, went over. A roof screw tearing through one of those panel frames takes some force.

Have you done any measurements as to what sort of power you are generating from the panels as yet? I imagine the multiplication factor would be pretty high where you are. On a real good day I can touch on x5 Kwh rating for mine but more usual in summer is 4+. It's coming up to 3x on average here and x2 was the average only a few weeks back.

I was also a bit skeptical of tec screws into the ali chassis of the panel, your latest blow confirmed my worries... I have used 8x 6mm stainless bolts to hold each panel, they are through the mounting hole of the ali frame of the panel, then with either a square tab or a body washer, they clamp down on the angle section frames... my only concern is that the ali deflects one way and the frame the other, things might get interesting, I hope not...

Test shading with about an A4 size shadow on a test array, I saw a remarkable drop off on array output... Unfortunately I cannot determine whether the result was spurious or general, as my current power usage during peak daytime is about 1,5kw, so a little over 1 and a bit's worth of rack's of panels... I will only be able to really see a real difference if I push the load up...

Tomorrow sees me painting the mast and reinstalling the blow gennie if the weather holds back on the wind for a while, weird, isn't it.... I have to wait for the wind to die so I can drop the mast, then wait for it to die so I can up it again... while its up, the damn thing sits there looking at me with not a breath of wind.... Until I want to drop it or change a guy wire... then its hurricane time.... At least the sun shine fairly regularly...

Interestingly, the quickest way to get it to rain here is to take out an electric lead and drill... downpour initiates before job completion....

Winds of 40-50km/h and thunderstorms have hit us this midday.... A welcome respite from the dry post-winter weather we are having, so with somewhat mixed feelings of appreciation and being somewhat irked at not being able to get the blow gennie up to its new position, I dolefully, but gleefully watch the rains fall....

Yesterday was a day of cardio workout for me, 10 steps up and 10 steps down the average ladder climb, with about 5 to 10 trips for each of 4 guy wires, amounts to a fair workout!! Add to that lugging drills et al, tugging on cables, no wonder I am knackered today..... The guy wires are now fully secured (6mm Braided Stainless cable with Galv'd chains and fittings at ground tie points), the winch is fully mounted, the lift pulleys and supporting brackets, as well as the top section of the mast have been painted, just the genhead to fit! (and paint the spool of the winch a dashing silver, as the previous spool got a dose of salt water during a loan and rusted away by the time it was returned...)

So far, touch wood, the lovely lightning conductor that is sitting at 10m hasn't attracted any attention from Thor.... I hope it stays that way! The closest strike was about 2km away so far....

Enough Rambling... Here is another crappy pic I took yesterday of the mast and guys.... The grey dismal weather can be clearly seen in the background....

You thought that 6mm cable was overkill but you were plenty happy with your decision to pony up for it when the wind was blowing weren't You?

That's my outlook too. It's not overkill if I sleep contently at night not having to worry about something because I knew I overdid it and if something does go wrong, I'll have a lot more to worry about with a lot of other things to be concerned any how.

It's always the same, you do something and are keen to see the results and then the weather screws you over. Every time I change something with my panels I can be assured of 3 days cloudy weather. Water the garden with the mains and it will rain next day, water with the tank and it won't rain for a month.

I feel your Knacckery Ed. Haven't been so good the last week and a half but got better this last few days and finished a few things i have been stewing on. Yesterday was the Engine Crane. Finished it after closing time when it was just on dark which meant it was ready for today. I lifted that SL2 that seems way heavier than the 200Kg I looked it up as. Wheeled engine crane with the 6" wheels I put on the thing for easy mobility on the rough driveway, ran the hook down from the electric winch to the chain I attached and lifted the Muther with the press of a finger. Just left the boom arm up high where I pumped it. That flaping about with the handle and the hydraulic ram gets real old real fast. Moved the lister to the corner out the way and then set about cleaning up where I had been doing all the Injun ear ring. Had motors dragged out everywhere from the 2 Wheel tractor project, the IMAG genny and the Ruggerini I bought the other month.

Cleared the other side of the shed and organized that then effortlessly picked up all the engines, wheeled them over and sat them down on the ground, on trolleys or got some beams and stacked them up on the frames for space saving. I realised I can now also get things up to the mezzanine level I could have never carried up a ladder. From now on when I Buy panels, I'll stack them on a pallet then just run a sling through it when I get home and lift them off all together. If I extend the arm on the thing way out and make a platform to put a 44 full of water on the back, I could lift panels up to the roof as well.

Made work a LOT easier but the bending down kills me. I'm too tall for things on the floor. Pushing the crane around is hard after a few times as well. Need one of those motorized Jockey wheels on the back to move the thing for me. My back is aching and so is the rest of me actually but thankfully not too much to do tomorrow for Daughters homecoming party on Sunday.

I was asked to do a post-mortem on an off grid system. They'd had a lightning storm and both generator and top end inverter/charger system died.

The grounding of the wind generator mast to a single rod in dry soil was itty bitty- 10 AWG. I found the lightning visibly scorched over from that connection to the power cable leading to the inverter generator. Blew the lightning suppression unit, the inverter/charger and from there headed to the autostart generator controller. A clean sweep, I think she said over $25K in repairs (paid by insurance). This was all top of the line gear.

The size of the grounding conductor and the earth connection impedance DOES matter when you put a metal spike way up with the wind genny calling "hit me". I lived in a home built in 1828 with the original standing seam metal roof and lightning rod system. Massive copper cables on glass isolated metal stand offs running accross the ridge, and down both gable ends (equivalent of 3 modern stories tall). The earth end was buried copper plates, 1/8" thick, about 8x8', about 4 foot deep. The house was directly hit about 4 times a year since it was at the highest point for miles around. The only damage was the much later addition of a phone line interface box in the basement- it was blown off the basement wall a couple times in the 4 years I lived there.

For modern lightning grounding, 00 or 000 bare copper cable laid in ground enhancement material (GEM) in a trench is now well proven and commonly used in the power industry. The GEM or 98% carbon/cement mix acts to provide a huge increase in surface area to the soil. A very thin layer with a thickening around the copper is used to conserve the GEM. It's done dry, and the soil above watered after it is shaded carefully with dirt.

If you don't give it a good low resistance path to earth, it will find other ways you may not like.

@Glort: Up until about 10years ago, my back was quite good... Nowadays, things are getting to EOL I reckon, time to start putting bits back in, but that I am putting off until the very last.... Bending down, working at low levels does worry me a wee bit, but its the getting back up on my back feet that screws me over!

@Bruce: We have taken some notable strikes here in the past 25years, memorable ones indeed... The worst ones that come to mind are an instance when the Northern peak of the roof took a direct hit... that blew out every damn piece of kit in the place, including 2 fridges, tv's, microwave, entire network, pabx plus much, much more... Coupled with that, the ?air pressure? caved in a short section of roof on an adjoiner to that pitch as well.... That day I was on the upper floor and the hit was about 2m from where I was standing, fortunately no physical damage, except that I now here aliens singing when I don't wear my tinfoil hat...

The second one I remember clearly, was a ground strike about 75m from the house... At that stage we didn't have our own transformer on the pole outside, the neutral was bonded about 500m away, the earth neutral bonding at the pole had rotted away just below ground level apparently... Well, needless to say, about 20 zillion volts made its way up through my pristine db board and all of a sudden N/E differed by more than the household kit could handle.... Auto start gennie, network, pabx, microwave, you name it up in smoke....

After that I got a bit pissed off, naturally, and tied E to N in my board, in each board in fact (there is one main db board and 4 separate sub boards on the premises) .... I have also tied E/N on each of the 3 permanently connected gensets too..

I know this is not the best thing to do, but so far, a few ground strikes later, nothing major blown.... Oh yes, I neglected to mention that way before these strikes I had installed db board surge suppressors, at insistence of the insurance company, fat lot of good they did.. Having said that, its time to put on the tinfoil hat again....

Multiple hard grounding of neutral to earth may help but usually causes greatly elevated magnetic fields that's not so good for your health and can cause some serious "ground loop" problems for connected electronics. When AC current has alternate paths instead of on it's mated neutral, even tiny amounts of current can "light up" the whole house. A single 60W bulb can make 8 milligaus over an entire portion of the house that way, easily. Naturally, I learned that the hard way.

The best solution for electronics it to put them all on an isolation transformer; then you can provide a new isolated earth connection for that gear and besides the better protection, will have no stray neutral current. Avoiding long wired data cables (from building to building) by using fiber instead is also very helpful; lightning causes hundreds of volts change in DC earth potential between two locations. I violated this rule for my remote engine shed, running cat5 cable in the metal conduit. Bit me once- opto isolator on the end and resistors feeding it fried after a lightning storm. For short runs I use plastic fiber (under 200 feet or so), multimode glass fiber with ST connectors for the long ones. Glass fiber interfaces are more expansive and putting on the connectors and polishing the ends and checking via microscope is tedious.

Lightning does seem to have preferred locations. I had one neighbor on the top of a hill who had the same power pole and transformer hit and destroyed 3x in 3 years. The power co. put an extended lightning rod on the pole and a big fat down-lead and grounding system for that pole. That did the trick.

I'm kinda stuck with multi NE at the moment... if and when I ever move, I will certainly plan the new domicile a bit better than this one is... This house, conduiting and associated electrical is circa 1940... there have been various owners over the years, and barring the original builder, I have been the longest single owner, and, scarily, that's for the last 25 years only.... It has been a bit of a nightmare trying, and still trying to in some places, sort out the various handyman/tenant/owner repairs of the last multiple decades.... Invariably a small job ends up to be a major exercise with several layers of quick and crappy fixes to be removed before I can do a reasonably robust repair or bit of maintenance...

Enough biaatching though, I should be almost finished just before I die..

Unfortunately fiber wasn't available when I wired this place to UTP specs.... No way I'm going to change that... probably ever! (Somewhere around 50 network ports on the switches occupied, a dedicated room, tiny that it may be, for my linux web/mail/samba servers, not counting 3x household AP's and a few outside ones too).... I am kinda tied into the whole mess... Damn, I forgot the hardwired pabx, 24 extensions, alarm system, 70 something hardwired zones, and then a couple of hard wired dvr systems with 20 something cameras hardwired...

No wonder I need a tinfoil hat and my coffee keeps boiling over if I set it on the kitchen table in a tin mug.... This is not a very healthy environment for your style ailments.... In fact I'm surprised I don't pick up any symptoms myself.... Must be my misspent youth spent in hi current ac/dc welding environments and burning lots of nitro and the holy black that's killed off all the sensory bits that matter....

The heavy Cable From a Lightening rod is Important. If it's not thick enough, the batteries you hook the other end to won't be fully charged when the Lightening strikes. You only have a second you know and wouldn't want to waste all that Free energy!

Don't worry.... I did think of that.... I am taking a different approach, thin wires! They slow the electricity down and it shows they are working properly because they are staying nice and warm. I get hot when I work hard, so the wires should too...... I have also put the batteries in a big deep freeze, they take much longer to charge at -40C, so therefore they must be holding more electricity now... also, because it is a top loading freezer, when you open the lid slowly and carefully in damp weather, you can see a sort of white smoke in there... I am sure thats the magic smoke that lives inside all the darksuckers that I have... Everybody else calls them light bulbs, but they are wrong. They are DARKSUCKERS. When they get full of dark, you have to throw them away and get new ones... Take a close look and you will notice when they are full that they go black inside and stop sucking up more dark...

We know the speed of light, but dark is so fast that nobody has measured it...

Put batteries in a sealed space with an electric switch and make contact slowly and I predict all that dark will escape in a blinding flash that will move so fast as to create a sonic boom and a shockwave.

The dark may be traveling so fast if does not have time to open the door or window to escape so you could find your walls in the top field and the roof on the bottom field. You may be unevenly distributed around a 500M radius.

I knew I was doing my solar thing wrong! None of my wires get warm! I try to make them work hard as I can but they must be lazy. I guess I need MORE panels so they earn their keep. And here is silly me buying all this cable trying to make it easy for the electrons to get from the panels ( they are black, must be trying to escape the dark they are full of) to the inverter and into the wires.

I should have thought about the efficiency like a factory and made the wires I had work harder not put more wires in and have higher costs. I feel so silly now but thanks for the heads up Ed. Makes perfect sense when you think about it and I don't know how I could have possibly missed it. That's what you get for believing everything you read on the net.

I'll make those wires sweat the plastic insulation right off them, just you wait and see how I turn things around!